OrionBPM, a boon to SMBs

 Business process management (BPM) solutions have been successful in helping companies increase the agility and responsiveness of their IT infrastructure, improving the flexibility of their applications and processes to meet new business requirements. Yet many BPM solutions require significant investment in time, money and resources and often require a significant focus on IT infrastructure-related issues.

While our research projects that the general BPM market is poised to continue growing steadily over the next five years, it also shows that there are a large number of companies who require more tactical and process-driven solutions for specific tasks.

There are hundreds of processes that exist within an enterprise today, and managing them has become a challenge as organizations move to become more efficient. Though pure play BPM solutions can solve these issues, the required resources, time and cost will put off many enterprises. This is highly significant, especially from the standpoint of a small and medium business (SMB).

OrionBPM is a focused and process-oriented solution that can be deployed at department level or enterprise level. Using OrionBPM, enterprises can start automating and managing these type of challenges long before they would be able to with a BPM platform. It is a versatile, flexible and a scaleable solution that meets enterprise challenges like process design, documentation, workflows, human and system participation, alerts and escalations.

OrionBPM is more or less a code-less environment using which an organization can conceive, design and implement processes quickly and cost effectively for faster ROI. It comes with inbuilt support for fundamental needs like defining an enterprise in terms of locations, business unit, profiles, data sources and applications. Users can quickly design processes, tasks and interactive forms pulling/pushing data to existing databases/applications, process workflows, call web services etc.

OrionBPM's Software as a Service (SaaS) model provides a risk-free alternative for SMB segment that are just getting started with the process automation path or even larger businesses which are planning to deploy processes using web technologies for the benefit of customers, vendors and employees.

Quick implementation

Implemented using Microsoft.NET platform, OrionBPM needs just a windows 2000/2003 server to get installed. This model can be very appealing to the SMB segment to get started on a process-oriented approach and play with the big boys in terms of IT agility and responsiveness to changing business demands and become a highly automated, productive and competitive organization without the big IT spends.

As the demands grow, a customer can choose to implement the enterprise license of OrionBPM in-house. By using this offering, an organization, its locations, employees, customers and vendors can be on a single collaborative platform quickly and cost effectively.

"Though OrionBPM is not a true BPM solution, it's more than just a BPM solution and it has all the building blocks that are essential for a BPM solution plus features that are essential for deploying business process on a stand-alone mode.

Efforts are already underway to fill the gaps to make it a true BPM solution. It is a tactical solution for many of the problems an enterprise faces today and from the Indian domestic market context, a true BPM adoption is still a while away and from a SMB standpoint, companies are just beginning to be on the way to get automated.

"Its flexible deployment approach and SaaS version enable companies to get the product in their hands more quickly at a fraction of the usual cost and start proving the effectiveness of the solution. The SMB segment is easier to penetrate than some of the enterprise sales that many BPM players are courting today, and as a result OrionBPM has the potential to gain substantial traction in this burgeoning market," he adds.

Author: Sunil Krishnan is Founder & CTO, Orion Web Solutions Pvt Ltd.